


Tonight. Tomorrow. Forever.

by motherbearof3



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Angst, F/M, Halloween, Heartbreak, Twilight zone-ish, possible happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-31
Updated: 2018-10-31
Packaged: 2019-08-13 21:18:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,514
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16479932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/motherbearof3/pseuds/motherbearof3
Summary: Olivia and Noah return home after trick or treating to find someone waiting for them.





	Tonight. Tomorrow. Forever.

**Author's Note:**

> So this all started because of thebarsondaily prompt this week: trick. But once I got started, I couldn't stop and it snowballed into more than 3500 words. I wasn't really sure how it was going to turn out. I tried a couple endings and decided I liked this one best. Don't throw things please.

Surely it was just a trick of the light from the streetlamp she thought, combined with the fog that had settled in while she and Noah made the rounds so he could ring doorbells and collect candy. Either that or she was so tired she was hallucinating. As they approached their apartment building, Olivia Benson thought she saw Rafael Barba standing there against the railing of the steps, hands in the pockets of his jacket, studying the toes of his sneakers intently. But it couldn’t be. Because Rafael Barba, former ADA for Manhattan SVU, had walked out of their lives thirty eight weeks before, leaving her outside the courthouse, tears freezing on her cheeks.

“Uncle Rafa!” Noah shouted, and broke into a run, his proton pack bumping against his small shoulders at each step.

The hallucination raised his eyes at the sound of the boy’s voice and turned his head in their direction, an amused smile creasing his face at the sight of the miniature Ghostbuster sprinting toward him, followed more slowly by the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Noah had been introduced to the original film by his Uncle Sonny and when he declared that’s what he wanted to be for Halloween, he told his mother she could be the giant overstuffed lumbering white character. Olivia was feeling more indulgent with him lately and acquiesced, although she wondered wryly if that’s how he saw her. Grateful for the oversized headpiece that hid the hot tears filling her eyes, she blinked rapidly, watching her son wrap his arms around the man’s waist and receive an embrace in return.

Having gotten her tears under control, Olivia pulled off the head, grateful for the cool air that hit her face and met his green eyes with what she hoped was neutrality. He nodded at her, knowing a conversation was due but not in front of the boy in the jumpsuit who had hold of his hand in one small one and a sack of candy in the other. There was no question whether he was coming inside with them, as Noah was already tugging him toward the door, talking rapid fire about everything that had happened in his six year old life in the last eight months. He didn’t notice the two adults had yet to speak as they rode the elevator to their apartment. Wordlessly, Olivia unlocked the door and addressed her son.

“Noah, honey, go take your costume off and get your pj’s on. It’s late. Leave the candy here,” she added as he started down the hallway with the bag still in hand. “You can have one piece when you’re changed.”

“Don’t leave before I get back, Uncle Rafa!” Noah called over his shoulder as he ran down the hall after dropping the bag on the couch.

Olivia moved slowly to the coffee table and bent awkwardly to put the head of her costume down, making Rafael wonder if she’d been hurt at work, a spear of concern slicing through him. He watched as she straightened, putting a hand to her lower back and then reached behind her neck to the zipper that ran down her spine and fumbled, not being able to lower it.

“Shit.” He heard her mutter.

“Here. Let me help,” Rafael said softly, stepping closer to her.

He moved her hair aside, fingers brushing the back of her neck and he heard her intake of breath at his touch. At this proximity, he could smell her shampoo and subtle perfume. Closing his eyes briefly, he was back in his apartment the night before the jury returned his not guilty verdict in February. She had showed up uninvited, telling him Lucy was spending the night with Noah. He was grateful for the company and grateful she knew he needed it to keep him from obsessing over what might happen if he was found guilty. They talked long into the night, finally crossing the line they’d had their toes against for years when he kissed her. Kissing turned into touching and then they were in his bed. Rafael slept dreamlessly for the first time since that night in the NICU with Olivia next to him. When he woke, she was gone and he didn’t see her again until the courtroom later that day. She hugged him after the not guilty verdict, but waking up alone had cemented his decision to quit the DA’s office. Clearly she’d had regrets. Which was why he was so surprised at her reaction outside the courthouse. It broke his heart to tell her goodbye, but he couldn’t stay, even if they no longer worked together knowing she didn’t return his feelings. He had practiced law long enough that bar reciprocity allowed him to work in just about any state, and while he’d have liked to flee to the other side of the country, he was an east coaster; and after spending some time with relatives in Miami, found a job in Washington D.C. with the help of Randy Dworkin. He and his attorney had become friends and the other man kept him abreast with news from home. More specifically about the NYPD SVU division. He learned about the fiasco with the Mexican cartel that ended with Peter Stone’s sister being kidnapped and killed and the school shooting by the teenager whose own father had raped him. Rafael didn’t know what finally made him decide to take a trip back home that month. But after he visited his mother, he found himself outside the Benson family apartment building at her urging, trying to work up the courage to go inside and knock on Olivia’s door. Her voice brought him back to the present.  
  
“Is it stuck? Just break it already. I’m sweltering,” she said irritatedly.

The zipper was stuck on a small piece of white fabric, but he had no problem releasing it, and pulled it down the length of her back. Olivia immediately yanked her arms from the sleeves and pushed the costume down over her hips and legs, stepping out of it. Her shoe got caught for a moment and she wobbled. Rafael reached out and grasped her arm to steady her. She turned and he got a good look at her and his eyes widened with surprise. This was one thing Randy hadn’t mentioned. There was a reason why she was dressed as the oversized marshmallow character: she didn’t need any padding as her abdomen was large with child. Before he could voice any of the questions that suddenly flooded his mind, Noah came running back, now dressed in pajamas and dove for the candy bag, dumping it on the coffee table.

“What should I have, Uncle Rafa? What’s your favorite?” the boy asked.

Before she could stop herself, Olivia plucked a chocolate bar with almonds from the pile and held it out to Noah. “Rafa likes these.” Then she turned away, more tears pricking her eyes and said, “I’ll be right back. Only one piece, sweet boy.”

Olivia made her way down the hall to her bedroom and then adjoining bathroom, closing the door and leaned against it, not fighting the tears anymore. She’d been extra emotional lately and the reappearance of the man in her living room didn’t help.

“Momma pees a lot.” Noah offered the bar to the man who had sank down on the couch and then began to separate the items into chocolate, non chocolate and non candy piles. “She says it’s our baby’s fault. Is that why you came back? To be here when our baby is born next week?”

He clucked his tongue at a toothbrush and tossed it into the non candy pile.

“I call him Eddie, like my elephant, even though that’s not going to be his name. Momma said she has a name picked out, but she won’t tell me. She said she wants to see if he looks like he fits the name once he’s born. I was hoping he might be born on my birthday, but Momma said that’s too long to wait.”

Our baby. The almost seven year old said it like it was nothing. But maybe to him it was nothing. He’d been living with the knowledge his mother was having a baby for -- how many months, Barba wondered? The only pregnant woman he’d spent any amount of time around had been Rollins. Based on that experience, he judged Oliva to be about ----  Rafael’s brain skidded to a halt.

“Next week?” he asked.

“Yeah. Momma talked to the doctor and they picked a day. She’ll go to the hospital for an operation and our baby will be born. I’m going to stay with Aunt Amanda and Uncle Sonny and Jesse.” Satisfied that everything was sorted appropriately, Noah selected a package of peanut butter cups. “Momma said one piece, but this is one candy with two pieces inside.”

“That counts as one piece,” Rafael assured him. “Does your mother usually take this long in the bathroom?”

Olivia had emptied her bladder and splashed water on her face to cool it down and erase the traces of tears. Looking in the mirror, she appeared calm, but inside she was a mass of nerves. _Why couldn’t he have waited a week or two to come back to New York?_ Then the baby would have been born and she’d be in a better state to deal with him and his questions. Because she knew he had them. Not that she didn’t have a few of her own, she snorted, then jumped as there was a firm knock at the bathroom door.

“Olivia, are you all right?”

Rafael had schooled his voice but she could hear the underlying concern tinged with anger in the tone. Taking a deep breath and placing a hand on her abdomen as the baby within gave her a little kick at the sound of his father’s voice, Olivia opened the door.

“I’m fine, Barba. Thanks for your concern.” She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her voice.

He stepped back to allow her to exit the bathroom, but moved to bar her from leaving the bedroom.

“Liv, we need to talk,” Rafael said, his green eyes flickering from hers to her belly and back.

Olivia resisted the urge to remind him he was the one who left town and hadn’t made any attempt to contact her in the last eight months. The part of her that was furiously angry with him had melted with the snow the spring before. When the doctor told her it wasn’t lingering flu that had her so tired and nauseous, but pregnancy, she resolved to love their baby with all the love he clearly hadn’t wanted from her. When the doctor asked if she wanted to know the sex, she said yes immediately, and when he confirmed it was a boy, she cried. All that had remained toward Rafael was a sadness that he would likely never know his son. As he looked at her, she wondered if he even realized the child she carried was his.

She sighed and unconsciously rubbed her rounded belly. “I know. But not when Noah is around. You can either wait until I get him in bed or leave and we can talk tomorrow when he’s in school.”

Rafael wasn’t going anywhere. He wanted answers tonight.

“I’ll wait,” he said firmly.

Noah was thrilled to learn that his Uncle Rafa was going to visit a little while longer and tried bargaining for a later bedtime. He compromised with the promise of the man reading his bedtime story. Story turned into stories and finally, with a promise to come back another day for dinner, the boy snuggled down under the covers with Eddie and closed his eyes. Olivia lingered in the doorway, looking at her son, who would be her oldest child in less than a week. Her younger gave her a nudge and her stomach growled, reminding her it was time for a snack. Pulling Noah’s door closed, she returned to the living area where Rafael was in the corner of the couch where he had always sat when he used to visit, sorting the pile of chocolate candy into smaller piles by type. Olivia smiled when she saw the bar with almonds she’d handed Noah for him had been unwrapped and was missing two bites.

“Drink?” she asked, placing a hand on his shoulder, the way she would have months ago. He had shed his jacket and the sweater he wore beneath was soft under her fingers. He turned his head at her touch. “I can’t, for obvious reasons, but I think I still have some of your favorite here.”

“No, thanks.” He wanted a clear head for this conversation. “Coffee?”

“Sure.”

As Olivia moved about in the kitchen, he turned where he sat to watch her. The lower half of her body was hidden by the counter but he gazed at her profile. Her face was slightly fuller and her breasts larger than he remembered from the one night when his his hands and mouth became acquainted with her curves. She returned to the room carrying a mug of coffee and a glass of milk; on which was balanced a plate of fruit, cheese and one cookie. He took the cup from her and lifted the plate from the glass, placing it on the table next to Noah’s piles of candy.

“It’s time for junior and I to have a snack. I’ll share the grapes, apples and cheese, but take my cookie and I’ll shoot you,” she said after lowering herself to the couch opposite him, taking a sip from her glass.

“Noah told me the baby is a boy,” he said, raising his own beverage. It was exactly the way he liked it. Of course she remembered.

“He is.” She placed a hand on her stomach. In protection or affection, he wasn’t sure. The she took a breath and plunged in. “Why are you back, Rafael? And where the hell have you been?”

“Miami first for a while, but working in D.C.” He answered the easy one first, then took a stab at the other. “I don’t know what made me come back, Liv. Honestly. I just woke up the other day and knew I had to. I wasn’t even sure I was going to come see you, but my mother -- my mother said if I was here I needed to. That you and I needed to clear the air. Get on with our lives, as it were. But it looks like you took care of that just fine.”

Rafael looked pointedly at her belly.

“You’re an ass, Barba.” Olivia’s eyes flashed with emotion. She was tired and her back and feet hurt from following Noah around and she didn’t want to dance around any more. They did enough of that the first six years of their relationship. She put her milk down on the table and splayed her palms on either side of her swollen abdomen.

“This is your baby, Rafael. No one else’s,” she tried to say the words with anger, but couldn’t. He was here, in front of her and she kept going back and forth between elation and sadness. “I got pregnant the night we spent together. Before you decided you had to _move on_.”  Her voice cracked on the last two words and she closed her eyes against the tears building in them.

“Mine?” The word was barely above a whisper and she opened her eyes to see his hand hovering over her stomach. She nodded, swallowing hard. “He’s my son?” Olivia nodded again, and reached out to cover his hand with hers, guiding it down to the spot where the baby was pushing with a knee or elbow. Feeling the counter pressure against his palm, Rafael’s green eyes widened.

“Why didn’t you tell me, Liv?” he asked hoarsely, still trying to process that the movement he was feeling was being made by his child. Their child.

“Because you walked away from me, Rafael. You left me standing in the cold and walked away.”

“You’re the one who walked away first, Olivia,” he countered. “You snuck out while I was sleeping. Like you were ashamed of what we did.”

“I wasn’t ashamed. I left because I had to. I woke up in your arms and realized that was the best night’s sleep I’d had in longer than I could remember. And I wanted to stay there. I wanted to stay in your arms forever. But if the jury came back with a guilty verdict, that could never happen. So I left before I got too comfortable. I left before I said I loved you. Because if I said that and you went to jail -- “

Olivia met his eyes, their hands still clasped on her abdomen.

“You didn’t go to jail, but I lost you after all. Then I found out I was pregnant, and I realized this baby was a piece of you I would never lose. The doctor asked me, given my age and the risk for miscarriage or birth defects, if I wanted to consider terminating. I told him I did that once and have lived with regret ever since. I was not going to do that again. I said whatever happened, happened. And what happened was a perfect baby boy grew inside me. Every test has come back normal.”

“Then why did you schedule a c-section for next week? Noah said you’re having the baby next week.”

Again, Rafael’s only recent experience was Rollins’ who had an emergency c-section because of a placental abruption, so he assumed they were only done because something was wrong.

“You mean instead of going through labor?” Olivia shook her head and clutched at his hand, tears threatening. “I couldn’t do that. I made it through this whole pregnancy alone. Every doctor’s appointment, every test, every little ache and pain and every kick. I did it all alone. But I couldn’t go through labor alone. Without you.”

She blinked and tears rolled down her face. Rafael felt his heart break. He had left her. Abandoned her with a life growing inside her because he was afraid to face his feelings and afraid to ask her why she’d left his apartment or how she felt. Tears filled his own eyes.

“I’m sorry, Liv. I shouldn’t have walked away. I’ll never leave you again. Can you forgive me?”

He had moved closer to her as they’d talked and now Rafael bowed his head over their hands still clasped together on her abdomen, in supplication to her and their unborn child. Olivia felt hot tears soak through her shirt. She put her other hand on his head and carded her fingers through his hair, noticing there was more gray in it now than eight months before. It was a soft as she remembered, though, and as she stroked his head, she made wordless sounds of comfort before finally saying quietly,

“I forgave you a long time ago, Rafa. I couldn’t raise your son holding a grudge against you. Especially if he has your eyes. I wouldn’t be able to look into them and stay angry.”

Rafael raised his head and met her gaze.

“I should have said it a long time ago, Olivia, but I love you.”

“I love you too.” She pulled on his hands to bring him closer and, leaning forward as much as she could, met his lips with hers. His lips were as she remembered and she whimpered with the realization it was actually happening after so many months of longing. But their position was not one she could stay in for long and she had to pull away reluctantly, cupping his face, which was covered in a beard that she’d decided she really liked, and ran her thumb across his bottom lip.

“Stay,” Olivia said.

“I told you, I’m never leaving you again. You…. or our sons,” Rafael replied.

“I meant stay now. Tonight. Your son requires I go to bed at a reasonable hour or else I barely make it through the day and with traipsing after Noah earlier, I’m about dead on my feet,” she explained.

“Tonight. Tomorrow. Forever,” he promised, getting up and helping her to her feet.

Olivia wasn’t kidding. She was asleep minutes after she lay her head on the pillow, Rafael spooned behind her, his arm protectively curled around her stomach.

“Momma? Momma, are you asleep?”

Olivia opened her eyes to see Noah standing before her, tugging at her arm. She blinked. They were standing on the sidewalk almost to their apartment building. He was still in his Ghostbusters costume and she in hers. She blinked again. There was no one standing at the stair railing. It had just been a trick of the streetlamp and fog. She sighed and rubbed her rounded belly through the costume.

“Come on, boys. Let’s go home.”

She took Noah’s hand and they had just started up the stairs to the door when she heard her name.

“Olivia.”

**Author's Note:**

> So once I got to the end I realized this not only had a Halloween theme, but also was a little Twilight Zone-ish, or reminiscent of the Ray Bradbury short stories I remember reading in high school. His were a lot scarier, but still kept you wondering once you got to the end.


End file.
